“How you doing, man?”
“Could be worse. Where’s Ray?”
“I don’t know. I saw him get hit but I don’t know how bad. I thought he might’ve come back here.”
“Nah he aint,” he said. “Think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think we done for of all of them who wanted to make a fight of it. I’d say the rest are just waiting for us to go away.”
He had the BAR across his lap. The .380 and an extra magazine for it were on the ground beside him. He was hatless and coatless and both his shirtsleeves had been ripped off and I could see he’d used them to bandage his left arm.
I squatted beside him and lit a cigarette and handed it to him. “How bad?”
“I got the bleeding pretty well stopped. Armbone’s busted.” His voice was tight with pain. “You find her?”
“No. But I saw him, and a maid said he’s got her. As long as we’re on the gate, he’s not taking her anywhere. Soon as it’s light I’ll start looking.”
“Ah hell, Jimmy, he’s gone, man. I can’t say if she was with him, but if you didn’t find her she mighta been with—”
I grabbed his good arm. “What the hell you talking about, he’s gone…if she was with him?…When?”
“Hey, man.” He jerked his arm and I let go of it.
“Fucken Cadillac. Who else it gonna be but him? It come tearing out of that hedge. I give it a burst, but this gorilla leans out the window and opens up on me with a goddamn Thompson. I about shit. I hunkered down outside the wall and wham, they clip the door and go skidding by with a fender peeled back and the bastard gave me some more of the tommy gun and nailed me in the arm. But I sureshit nailed him better. The Caddy had to cut a sharp turn on account of we blocked the road and the shooter come tumbling out. That’s him yonder. I put a coupla .380s in his head to be sure he wasn’t just resting up.”
He was pointing at a big man lying a dozen yards beyond the gate, faceup, his arms flung out, his legs in an awkward twist. The tommy gun lay close by.
“I couldn’t see in the car all that good,” LQ said, “but I guess she mighta been in there.”
She was—I knew she was. She would’ve told him I was coming. She would’ve kicked at him and said James Rudolph Youngblood was coming. As soon as he heard the shooting he would’ve known who it was and he would’ve taken her with him. I stood up, telling myself to stay cool, to think.
“We blocked the only road. Where’d he go?”
“Thataway, around the corner.” He waved toward the east end of the compound wall.
The moon was high and bright as a gaslamp. My wound burned and I checked it with my fingertips. It was swollen but the bloodflow had slowed to nothing and was already clotting. I went over to the dead guy. He had a big droopy mustache and there was enough moonlight to show the white scar at the edge of his eye. More good news for Rocha.
Then I remembered the river. The map showed a river running past the hacienda a couple of miles east of it, running all the way out to the ciénaga. I picked up the Thompson and went back to LQ.
“I’m betting there’s a road that goes over to the river. From there he’ll try to make it to the Monclova road.”
“Shitfire,” LQ said. “There’s nothing between here and there but desert, all rocky ground for…what’d we figure, forty miles? He aint making it to that road, not without a pair of wings.”
I detached the tommy gun’s magazine and checked the load, then snapped it back in place and handed LQ the weapon and he tested a one-hand grip on it, bracing the butt against his hip and swinging the muzzle from side to side. He grinned and cradled the gun under his arm.
“I’m gonna go get her.”
“That’s why we come,” he said.
“Got enough smokes?”
“Yep. Could do with some handy water.”
I went over to the Hudson and had to duck under the dash and hot-wire the ignition, since Brando had the keys. I cranked up the engine and backed the car around and drove up beside the gate. I took the water can out of the back and filled a couple of empty beer bottles for myself and jammed them between the backseat and the door so they wouldn’t spill, then set the rest of the can next to LQ, together with a tin cup.
“Be back soon as I can,” I said.
“Good Lord willing, I expect I’ll be here.”
I drove to the northeast rim of the bluff behind the compound and got out of the car. From there I could scan the country to the north for miles—a pale wasteland under the blazing white moon. To the northeast I could also see the lower portion of the river, extending into the distance like a wrinkled silver ribbon and ending at a dark patch of ground that had to be the ciénaga.
And then I saw something else—a small and barely visible cloud of dust moving slowly north alongside the river. It was them. He had his lights off. Me too. We didn’t need headlights anyway, not under that moon.
I hopped back into the car and wheeled it around and eased it along the dense growth of brush and mesquites at the edge of the open ground, gunning the engine, searching for the road to the river. And then I found it. It wasn’t a road so much as a rocky trail rutted by cartwheels. It went winding through the scrub and was so narrow that mesquite branches scraped both sides of the car. I had to take it easy over the rough ground—but even as slow as I was going, the Hudson swayed and bobbed like a boat on choppy waters.
Finally the scrub thinned out and shortened and the river came into view again, much closer now and shining bright under the moon. It was shallow and packed with sandbars. A few yards from the bank the trail turned north, and it was still rough going. Even at fifteen miles an hour the car bounced and swayed and the steering wheel jerked every which way. Now I was raising some dust too, and I wondered if he’d seen it.
I’d gone downriver about three miles when a front tire blew like a pistolshot. The Hudson pulled hard to the right but I wrenched it straight and kept going, the tire flopping. The river narrowed steadily. Then the ground gradually began to smooth out under the Hudson and the terrain began to darken and get grassy. I’d arrived at the end of the river, at the south end of the muddy ciénaga.
I stopped the car and got out to look things over. A cool north breeze had picked up and it pushed the stink of the mudpit into my face. The ground was slick under my heel-less boots. If I’d driven any farther north I would’ve bogged down in the muck.
He couldn’t have crossed the river anywhere along the way. To get past the ciénaga he had to go around it to the west. There were no tracks on the smooth ground around me, so he must’ve angled over in that direction before coming this close to the mud. I got back in the car and followed the edge of the mudpit to westward.
In less than a quarter mile I came on the Caddy’s tracks where they came up from the south and I could tell from the shape of them that he’d blown at least one tire on each side. The moon eased around to my right from behind me as I followed the tracks along the curving rim of the ciénaga to northward. Then the Caddy’s tracks angled away from the mudpit and I knew we were past it. The ground was hard and rough again. The Hudson jolted and pitched.
I drove on, the Hudson’s shadow slowly contracting against the left side of the car.
And then there the Cadillac was, not a half mile ahead. In the distance it looked like a bug on a dirty tablecloth. It took a moment for me to realize that it wasn’t moving. I drew the Mexican Colt from my pants and set it beside me.